Stars of YouTube video ‘How to Scam Del Taco’ arrested in Rialto

Pausing between mouthfuls, the man calling himself Mr. Califero proudly displayed his haul for the camera.

Seven tacos, a large order of fries, two sodas and two quesadillas with extra chicken would have cost $15. But as he titled his Feb. 19 homemade video, this was about “How to Scam Del Taco” and get the food for free.

“See what happens?” said the 6-foot-5, 500-pound narrator, whose real name is Robert Echeverria. “Guess that’s how you do it.”

As outlined in a video posted on the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube, Echeverria netted the feast from a Rialto Del Taco by calling the manager to say he was a local CEO whose lunch order had been botched and he didn’t have a receipt.

Five minutes later, he and two friends are seen in a parked SUV laughing, eating and mugging for the camera.

Rialto police didn’t find it so funny.

Within days of getting a tip about the video early this month, detectives identified the 32-year-old Echeverria as a gang member and obtained felony second-degree commercial burglary warrants for the arrests of him and his two 18-year-old friends.

If convicted, the maximum prison sentence could be seven years.

“This seems to be the new wave of crimes being committed: posted on YouTube for the world to see,” said Rialto police Lt. Joe Cirilo. “They’re victimizing someone here and making a joke out of it.”

On Monday, the video had been viewed 430 times. – pe.com

$40,000 for Man Tasered on YouTube

 

Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota’s state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It’s among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

“This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh,” said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota. – cnn

130-yr-old patient puzzles doctors

An ascetic admitted in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) claims to be 130 years old, but the doctors at the premier hospital are taking it with a pinch of salt.  Resting in the hospital after a surgery for removal of a bladder tumour, Sant Swami Ramanand, who hails from Behta jungle near Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh, claims that he is 130 years old.

“It is for sure that he is above 100 years old. But whether he is 130 years old or not, I am not sure about it,” said Dr N P Gupta, Head of the Department of Urology, AIIMS, under whom Ramanand is undergoing treatment.  Even if Ramanand is over 100 years old, he has created a record of sorts as it is the first time in the history of AIIMS wherein a person above the age of 100 had undergone a surgery.

“He was suffering from carcinoma of bladder. He has undergone a cysrtopanedoscopy and removal of bladder tumour without any incision,” Dr Gupta said.  Regarding the authenticity of Ramanand’s claims, Dr Gupta said, “There is no arrangement in medical science which can correctly suggest a person’s age after he or she has crossed the age of 60 or 70. If we are believing him, it is all because he talks about Gandhi and lots about the history of India.”

Regarding the present state of Ramanand, Dr Gupta stated that he has been operated upon successfully. He will be discharged sometime next week, he said, adding the hospital was yet to check if the cancer has spread elsewhere and study the tumour that has been taken out. The oldest person in the world, according to Guinness Book of World Records, is a 122-year French woman. – timesofindia

Swarm Of Bees Closes California Highway

Millions of swarming honey bees were on the loose Sunday after a truck carrying crates of the insects flipped over on a California highway. The California Highway Patrol said 8-to-12 million bees escaped Sunday from the crates in which they were stored and swarmed over an area of Highway 99 and stung officers, firefighters and tow truck drivers trying to clear the accident. CHP Officer Michael Bradley said a tractor trailer flipped over while entering the highway on its way to Yakima, Wash. The flatbed was carrying bee crates each filled with up to 30,000 bees. Bradley said several beekeepers driving by the accident stopped to assist in the bee wrangling. The bees had been used in the San Joaquin Valley to pollinate crops. – msnbc

Couple, married 83 years, share their secret

The year was 1925. Calvin Coolidge was president, Adolf Hitler released the first part of his book, “Mein Kampf,” Charlie Chaplin’s big movie was “The Gold Rush,” flappers were singing and dancing to “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” the Scopes Trial played out in Tennessee, the first television images were broadcast, Al Capone ruled the streets of Chicago, flagpole sitters were all the rage, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were the newest recording artists, the price of a first-class stamp hit 2 cents.

And in Hugo, Minn., an 18-year-old man named Clarence Vail married his 16-year-old sweetheart, Mayme. They had met in the eighth grade, and marriages at such young ages were more the norm than the exception back then. Unremarkable at the time, that union, now 83 years old and still as strong as ever, has finally claimed a place among the historic events of the year. …

They don’t have a magic formula to explain the success of their marriage. They just took seriously what they said to each other when they stood at the altar.

“You take your vows, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer,” Mayme said. “I guess you just stick to it, come what may.”

They say they haven’t had an argument since 1946, something that Mayme attributes to the fact that her husband, who is 101, is the strong, silent type who isn’t given to argument. “That’s why we got along so well,” joked the 99-year-old Mayme. “He never spoke out of turn. I didn’t give him a chance.” – msnbc

 

The Army Mule Robot

I posted this a year or more ago but it looks like they have made more progress since then.

Brain Surgeon Operates With a Cheap Cordless Drill

An eminent British neuro-surgeon has been performing complex brain operations using a £30 do-it-yourself cordless power drill at a clinic in Ukraine.

Henry Marsh, a senior consultant at St George’s hospital in Tooting, south London, has used the Bosch 9.6 volt battery-operated hand tool to open up the skulls of his patients to remove life-threatening tumours. Occasionally the battery has gone flat halfway through.

The operation is performed with the patients fully awake – a technique that fell out of use in Britain 50 years ago. Marsh said that Ukrainians could withstand such a practice because they were “very tough”.

The 58-year-old consultant travels to Ukraine twice a year to perform free operations at a clinic run by a fellow surgeon, Igor Petrovich. The handyman drill was used because the local doctors could not afford state-of-the-art equipment.

When working for the National Health Service, Marsh uses a £30,000 compressed-air medical drill, but he said that the Bosch was an effective stand-in. “There’s not a huge difference,” he said. “The drill is Igor’s solution. It’s simply an ordinary drill which he uses with the standard medical drill bits.

“I have used the Bosch drill myself when I’ve been operating with Igor. It’s exactly the drill that you could have in your garden shed. He bought it at a do-it-yourself shop.”

There is a shortage of fully trained anaesthetists so Marsh’s patients are given only a local anaesthetic. This enables him to talk to them to ensure that he is not doing any permanent damage as he drills. – anorak

Antarctic iceberg that looks like candy

One of them looks like a giant mint humbug, with its clear blue, green and brown stripes.The other looks as if it has been shot through with a streak of spearmint.

These stunning banded icebergs – formed over hundreds, if not thousands, of years – were pictured floating in the waters of the Antarctic.

Some of the stripes formed when layers of the iceberg melted and refroze.

Others were created from the dust and soil picked up when the ice sheet that gave birth to the iceberg was sliding down an Antarctic hillside.

They were photographed by Norwegian sailor Oyvind Tangen, on board a research ship around 1,700miles south of Cape Town and 660miles north of the Antarctic.

“It reminds me of striped candy I bought as a child,” said 62-year-old Mr Tangen.

Source: Dailymail